Plagiarism

 

 

I subscribe to online/email articles from conservative pundit and journalist and activist, Chris Rufo. On February 23, 2024, he sent me an email entitled, Harvard’s Plagiarism Problem Multiplies: Another administrator at the Ivy League university appears to have plagiarized her dissertation. I will spot-quote his article and then comment on his content that I quote.

 

My quick grasp of and characterization of what he will write about is that woke professors, of minority group affiliation, were often promoted and heralded as excellent when they were second-rate minds, and, were unscrupulous, plagiarizing in papers and dissertations written, to get their credentials and advance their careers. This is scandalous because these individuals cheated to get ahead, and then built a career built on stolen intellectual property taken from others without crediting the source of their ideas. That is outrageous.

 

I also want to point out that people of any group, traditional and favored (actually or allegedly), or alternative and disfavored (traditionally or allegedly), should see themselves as talented individuals. They may have to work a little harder or a little longer to get that dissertation completed and credentialed, but they can write their own dissertation and papers, do their own research, and come up original, brilliant hypotheses, experiments, and theories of their own. There never was a need to cheat or steal from other thinkers, but group-living, group-identifying, true-believing proponents of the Leftist holy cause are dumbed-down cognitively by living as anti-intellectual radicals.

 

 They cannot think or originate, not due to a lack of talent or an inferior racial or ethnic IQ score, but due to laziness, a lack of imagination, and self-imposed barriers erected around the self by the self as that person, a militantly group-living nonindividuator, fails to be an active, productive, creating individuator. This could feed into the need to plagiarize to come up with something to write about.

 

The other scandal that I will anticipate that Rufo will bring to light below is to reveal whether Harvard professors and administrators knew about this dishonest, shoddy, inferior pattern of scholarship and covered these realities up. If that occurred, then that institutional conspiracy to reward dishonest, shoddy scholarship, for the sake of finding minority candidates for plumb career jobs, is a scandal that should anger and make furious the public. If this coverup occurred, then those responsible should be fired. We want to send a message that each professional thinker is blessed—like is every unskilled employee at the local Wendy’s—with unlimited talent, bottomless potential, and rather high intelligence, capable enough never to need to steal the work of anyone else. Plagiarism will not be countenanced or go unpunished once discovered.

 

Here is Rufo (R after this): “Harvard has a plagiarism problem. At the beginning of the year, Claudine Gay resigned as university president following a plagiarism scandal. Weeks later, the Washington Free Beacon published a report indicating Harvard’s chief diversity officer, Sherri Ann Charleston, apparently plagiarized passages in multiple academic papers.

 

Now allegations have emerged that another Harvard DEI administrator, Shirley Greene of Harvard Extension School, plagiarized more than 40 passages of her 2008 dissertation .  . .  According to the Harvard directory, Greene is a Title IX coordinator affiliated with the Office for Gender Equity . . . The Harvard Crimson previously reported on the allegations against Greene, which a whistleblower lodged anonymously. I have obtained a full complaint, which paints a much more damning indictment of Green’s scholarship than the student newspaper had let on. Seen in its entirety, the complaint raises serious questions about Greene’s scholarship and academic integrity.

 

In the most serious instance, Greene lifts directly from Janelle Lee Woo’s 2004 dissertation, ‘Chinese American Female Identity.’ Greene copies words, phrases, passages, and almost entire paragraphs verbatim, without proper attribution or quotation. She also copes most of an entire table on ‘Racial/Ethnic Identity Development Models,’ a foundational concept in the paper, without acknowledging the source . . . In total, the complaint identifies dozens of such passages in Greene’s dissertation, ranging from minor infringements to what appears to be outright theft of concepts and language. Most of these instances would appear to violate Harvard’s own plagiarism policy, which states: ‘If you copy language word for word from another source and use that language in your paper, you are plagiarizing verbatim . . . you must give credit to the author of the source material, either by placing the source material in quotation marks and provide a clear citation, or by paraphrasing the source material and providing a clear situation.

 

This should sound familiar. For years, America’s elite institutions have maintained the convenient fiction that all racial disparities can be explained by racism, not disparities in behavior.”

 

My response: Racial disparities or any disparities, documented as existing between people belonging to in-power, privileged groups, and those marginalized individuals belonging to out-of-power, less-favored groups, studied and highlighted by psychologists, HR, or social scientists, are red herrings. These disparities are caused by individual hard work, taking advantage of personal talent, and being scrupulously honest about sources of input—or the lack of all three—so getting ahead or not is up to the individual. Only she can advance herself (and is to blame for failing) and only she can hold herself down and back (She is to blame for curtailing herself.).

 

Disparity in America is not caused by group rankings, and it cannot be solved by group ranking and racial and group quotas to enforce equity in the workplace or in academia, enforcing equality of outcome.

 

R: “For the subjects of Harvard’s plagiarism scandal, however, another plausible explanation exists: namely academics who focus on DEI and advocate lower standards for ‘oppressed’ racial academics who might hold themselves to lower standards of academic integrity than academics in more legitimate disciplines.”

 

My response: Rufo does not come out explicitly say that Harvard administrators and peers knew that certain DEI PhDs were plagiarizing, and that they deliberately or intentionally cover it up, but he registers two complaints against Harvard administrators and professors.

 

First, the universities that fabricated whole junk science departments of study out of whole cloth, may have contributed to the plagiarism scandal by allowing lower levels of academic scholarship to be allowed from graduate students form these DEI kinds of departments, and allowed lower levels of academic integrity.

 

Second, when we allow students, graduate students, even full professor to run in packs, as irrational, anti-intellectual ideologues peddling Leftism, their holy cause, we end up with people dumber, more arrogant, more cruel, and meaner than the average person. The enthusiastic, immoral, dull-witted true believer cannot complete academically against maverizing, hardworking, aspiring individuators of great personal rectitude.

 

Rufo: “Regardless of the cause, Harvard should ask itself a simple question: how did so many alleged plagiarists rise to positions of power at the nation’s most prestigious university? If Harvard officials believe that they can shrug off the university’s growing plagiarism crisis, they should know that this may just be the beginning My sources indicate that many more allegations are coming.”

 

My response: People should be promoted based on the content of their character and their merited achievement, and by doing scholarship as would an individuators, whose intellectual effort as an individual will be prodigious, brilliant, innovative and creative. The group identities owned by each student and graduate students is irrelevant. None should be held back due to bias, or be promoted due to preferential treatment.